Day 09 - Best scene ever
Out of every scene in every episode of every television show, series, or miniseries I've ever seen?!? What kind of a question is that?
This, though, has got to be in the top five.

Along with--let's be real--this one:

This is non-negotiable, really.

Day 08 - A show everyone should watch

Everything about The Wire is solid gold: characters, plot, pacing (once you get past the first two or so episodes). Gangsters love it! Baltimoreans love it! Middle class white girl bloggers love it! Because, seriously, what's not to love?
In a perfect world, Lester Freamon would be my life coach. That or President of the United States.

More on my last class of my Princeton career (which happened just this morning) later. For now:

Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite t.v show
It would have to be something from Season Six, which was pretty lame. Let's say the episode where Toby and Josh get into a fight and leave it at that.

Today was my last day of prison.
Of all the lasts this week, I think this last visit to prison was the hardest/best. My teacher gave me a reflection on teaching for me to frame and put up at my desk in Chicago. The prisoners said thanks. The TAs gave me friendly nods. I narrowly avoided crying in front of thirteen felons.
And just now in the car back, from F, the guy who drives the car, Psalm 37:3-4. And: "For the rest of your life, don't let anything intimidate you." And: "We stop making mistakes when we die."

Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite t.v show
For a long time it was "17 People." It might still be. There are other ones I really love, though, like the one on the death penalty, and the one where Leo has to testify, and of course Aaron Sorkin's swan song and Thomas Schlamme's love letter, "Commencement."

One of many excellent scenes in "17 People":

Day 05 - A show you hate could have written better
I don't invest time in watching shows I hate. There definitely are shows I hate, but I don't want to spend the time thinking about them long enough to do them justice here. Plus the idea of a YouTube link to a bad TV show existing on my blog offends my sensibilities too much to contemplate it.
So this is a show I wish I could swan in and save because, oh, it's such a good idea. But I just couldn't bring myself to watch beyond the first season.

Graduation is looming. Today I went to my last Monday classes at Princeton. Ever. This entire week is going to be a roller coaster of emotions, especially when I go to prison for the last time on Wednesday. On the whole, though, I'm happy it's the end of the school year. I'm ready for my trip with CC and Roommate J and I'm ready for reunions and graduation and summer.
I'm also inching closer and closer to being ready for my job. This morning I met up with my fellow Chicago fellows and they seem like a nice bunch. I even managed to squeak some cinnamon roll evangelizing in there. I told them about my plan to learn Spanish this summer, and they thought it was a good idea. The Aged Ps are getting me Rosetta Stone as a graduation gift. Things are falling into place.
On that note: I am putting the kibosh on graduation gifts. I definitely welcome e-mails/facebook messages/telepathically communicated well-wishes. Or, if you refuse to listen to me, I will accept incredibly moderate donations to the Get Nom de Plume to San Francisco to See the Tales of the City Musical Fund.


Day 04 - Your favorite show ever

Do I really have to explain this?

Happy Easter! I'm off to Philly to celebrate with the extended extended family. We will attend a barbecue and stick Peeps in the microwave.

Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this t.v season)
At first I thought, "Uh-oh." And then I thought, "PBS!"

I was in the mood for a new look, so this is it for now. Maybe more changes on the horizon? Maybe not.

Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching
Southland is a great TV show. It started out on NBC, but they didn't know what to do with it, so it got canceled. Then TNT picked it up, and commissioned new (too-short) seasons, but it still struggles to get viewers. (For once I'm not part of the problem, since I watch it streaming on the TNT website.) Stylistically, it's like nothing else on TV. Tone-wise, it's somewhere between The Wire and Law & Order. Over the course of its broadcast shifts, the awesome characters have moved front and center and the boring ones have receded. Regina King kicks ass. Michael Cudlitz acts rings around people. Ben McKenzie...looks good in a uniform. And that's okay.

My mother sent this to me this morning. Unlike the Jonathan Franzen piece, I can't summarize. It's short. Just read it. It's great.

I seem to be on a blogging roll today. This is what happens when I drink too much caffeine and then sit down to write a paper (12-17 pages for my race, drugs, and drug policy class, due a week from today).
While attempting to whittle down the Hair soundtrack lyrics I plan to reference in my paper, I was also exchanging facebook comments with a friend who had just watched The History Boys (film) for the third time. She asked me if I had read the play, complete with Alan Bennett's intro, and I proceeded to gush all over her wall along these lines: The History Boys is definitely one of those texts I've examined from a lot of angles (the playscript, the film, on stage in London, in McCosh in my freshman seminar). If I were to slap together my own religious text of choice it would probably be made up of equal parts History Boys quotes and quotes from The West Wing.
And then, I thought, why not?


Excerpts from Nom de Plume's Religious Text of Choice, There's a Way To Be a Person

‎Hector: The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

Dakin: Nice to be a bit more complicated.
Irwin: Or to be thought so.

Posner: But the pain. The pain.
Scripps: Hector would say it's the only education worth having.
Posner: I just wish there were marks for it.

Headmaster: There is a vacancy in history.
Irwin: (thoughtfully) That's very true.
Headmaster: In the school.
Irwin: Ah.

Mrs. Lintott: A grope is a grope. It is not the Annunciation.

Dakin: Are we scarred for life, do you think?
Scripps: We must hope so.

Rudge: How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another.

Posner: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained then it can be explained away.

Mrs. Lintott: Durham was very good for history. It's where I had my first pizza. Other things too, of course, but it's the pizza that stands out.

Scripps: You're beginning to write like him.

Scripps: Just because you've got a scholarship doesn't mean you've got to give him unfettered access to your dick.

Irwin: There is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.


Bruno Gianelli: We all need some therapy, because somebody came along and said, "'Liberal' means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't have to go to work if they don't want to!" And instead of saying, "Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave It To Beaver trip back to the Fifties...!", we cowered in the corner, and said, "Please. Don't. Hurt. Me." No more.

Josh: When I write my political memoir, this will be the character building funny part.

Bartlet: [to Gov. Ritchie] In the future, if you're wondering, "Crime. Boy, I don't know" is when I decided to kick your ass.

Sam: By the way, my Princeton Tigers could whip your Cal Bears any day of the week.
C.J.: At what?
Sam: Logarithms possibly.

Leo: I mean, there's a way to be a person.

Am I going to do it? Why, yes, I believe I am. After all, TV is probably the only medium I haven't examined over a 30 day period yet. We have to fix that.

Day 01- A show that should have never been canceled
Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching
Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this t.v season)
Day 04 - Your favorite show ever
Day 05 - A show you hate
Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite t.v show
Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite t.v show
Day 08 - A show everyone should watch
Day 09 - Best scene ever
Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you
Day 12 - An episode you’ve watched more than 5 times
Day 13 - Favorite childhood show
Day 14 - Favorite male character
Day 15 - Favorite female character
Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17 - Favorite mini series
Day 18 - Favorite title sequence
Day 19 - Best cast
Day 20 - Favorite kiss
Day 21 - Favorite relationship
Day 22 - Favorite series finale
Day 23 - Most annoying character
Day 24 - Best quote
Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26 - OMG WTF? season finale
Day 27 - Best pilot episode
Day 28 - First t.v show obsession
Day 29 - Current t.v show obsession
Day 30 - Saddest character death

Day 01- A show that should have never been canceled
I really could use more Veronica Mars. I watched this TV show throughout the Summer of Angst: 2010 and it was definitely a bright spot. Modern noir and a girl detective who leaves Nancy Drew in the dust? More, please.

That said, what am I doing next year?
I am very excited to announce that I will be returning to the weather and punctuality-obsessed Midwest to work at a South Side nonprofit in Chicago. I'll be coordinating a mentorship program for high school students: matching them with mentors, coming up with things for the mentor/mentee pairs to do, keeping tabs on them to make sure everything's running smoothly, and researching best practices. I have a yearlong fellowship from Princeton to do so, and I will be one of a handful Princeton grads with fellowships in the city. So I get to attend seminars with alums, dress in business casual, and eat Ann Sather's cinnamon rolls on my limited paycheck. It's going to be awesome.
So I'm spending this summer brushing up on (read: learning) Spanish and following along with the Aged Ps' travels. Luckily, I have last summer to learn from and I know what I have to do to be at home and still get work done. (Hint: get out of the house.) So expect to see me wandering around Damn-Big-Midwestern-University's campus with my headphones plugged in and Rosetta Stone at the ready on my computer.

Moments lasting ten or fewer seconds that have meant a lot to me, first installment:
The mother of a friend, who had previously shown relatively little interest in my choice of major, steps in to explain to someone who has been grilling me about what exactly I plan to do with it, "[Nom de Plume] is a writer. She's written a play. It's been performed several times and she's working on a novel."

My dad called me and told me to read Jonathan Franzen's piece in the most recent New Yorker. He told me it was about novels and solitude and that he had been really struck by it. It's available online for a short time, so I made some tea and sat down by our rain-streaked common room window and decided to go for it.
After I was done, I sent off a not-quite-coherent/not-entirely-useless e-mail, which I am pasting here for posterity:

First! The selected quotes (with some annotations).

"a jumbo bottle of Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap" [!!!]

"But then I looked at some lichens & wrote a bit about them & calmed down and figured out that my sorrow was due not to a loss of purpose but to the fact that I didn’t know who I was or why I was and that I didn’t show my love to my parents. I was coming close with my third point, but my next thought was a little off. I figured that the reason for the above was that time (life) is too short. This is, of course, true, but my sorrow wasn’t caused by this. All of a sudden it hit me: I missed my family." {Hall of the Revels note: this part appears in Franzen's teenage journal, an account of 24 hours spent alone in the woods as part of a hiking camp}

"Apparently, in the past thirty-five years, I’d become so accustomed to narrativizing myself, to experiencing my life as a story, that I could now use journals only for problem-solving and self-investigation. [I can reeeeaaaally relate to this problem] Even at fifteen, in Idaho, I hadn’t written from within my despair but only after I was safely over it, and now, all the more so, the stories that mattered to me were the ones told—selected, clarified—in retrospect." [this is interesting because this is what creative writing teachers tell you to do: wait it out. Sometimes is might be better to have the raw material, though, to turn to later.]

"The most interesting aspect of the novel’s origin may be the evolution of English culture’s answers to the question of verisimilitude: should a strange story be accepted as true because it is strange, or should its strangeness be taken as proof that it is false?" [GAH. WHY was this published after my thesis?!?]

"We now understand a novel to be a mapping of a writer’s experience onto a waking dream, and a crucial turn toward this understanding can be seen in Defoe’s tentative assertion of a less than strictly historical kind of truth—the novelist’s “truth.”"

"...and {David Foster Wallace}’d been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude."

"A funny thing about Robinson Crusoe is that he never, in twenty-eight years on his Island of Despair, becomes bored."

"I spent two hours on various drying projects, followed by an hour of searching the promontory, to no avail, for a critical piece of tent hardware that I’d lost in my mad dash. And then, in a matter of minutes, the rain ended and the clouds blew off and I realized I’d been staying in the most dramatically beautiful spot I’d ever seen." [The parts that struck me the hardest--the parts that struck me as most emotionally honest--were the parts when he was confronting his own limitations and then takes a step back and realizes.]

And now some thoughts

I liked this. My favorite parts were the parts about David Foster Wallace whose novels, like those of Jonathan Franzen, I have actively avoided reading. From my incredibly limited and highly speculative experience, I think he does a really great (and really moving) job of describing friendship with someone with a mean mental illness; you don't have to like every part of them, and you can be critical and still love them.
Come to think of it, that could apply to almost every friendship.

In the end, I wasn't as in love with this article as I thought I would be while I was in the midst of reading the really good parts, and I think it comes down to the fact that Franzen is clearly an extrovert and an article on the same topic would be more relateable to me if an introvert had written it. I think his perspective is valuable, but I almost wanted an accompanying piece by someone like, I don't know, Colm Toíbín. Someone who is certainly no Emily Dickinson--someone who is a huge fan of other people and their stories--but someone who at the same time wouldn't have been driven around the bend at age fifteen or whatever by 24 hours spent alone. Or not. Maybe the fact that solitude freaks him out a bit is what makes Franzen particularly suited to write this.

It certainly made me want to write something. I've got that tight feeling in my face I get when I've just written something particularly from the heart. So thanks, Jonathan Franzen, you're not a complete jerk.

Love,
[Nom de Plume]

Yesterday was Poem In Your Pocket Day (or: Are You Happy to See Me?) I didn't have pockets yesterday, and I've never been much of a poetry person, but I did spend a long time yesterday morning cleaning out my folders in Microsoft Word. While there, I came upon a paper I wrote in my junior year of high school about James Merrill where I acknowledged my ambivalent relationship to poetry and then proceeded to rhapsodize about his poem "Family Week at Oracle Ranch." I also provided a handy excerpt:

10. The Desert Museum

—Or, as the fat, nearsighted kid ahead

Construes his ticket, “Wow, Dessert Museum!”

I leave tomorrow, so you get a pass.

Safer, we both feel, instead

Of checking into the No-Tell Motel,

To check it out—our brave new dried-out world.

Exhibits: crystals that for eons glinted

Before the wits did; fossil shells

From when this overlook lay safely drowned;

Whole spiny families repelled by sex,

Whom dying men have drunk from (Randy, frightened,

Hugging Little Randy, a red hound)….

At length behind a wall of glass, in shade,

The mountain lioness too indolent

To train them upon us unlids her gems

Set in the saddest face Love ever made.

Yep, still a fan.

A week ago I handed in my thesis. Six days ago I got an e-mail from my adviser saying that it was a "triumph" and that I "should be very proud."
I am.
I've written here about my trip to London, but I haven't really mentioned what it meant for my thesis, or to me.
My thesis first: If it weren't for Anthony Blunt's memoir and the funding I got to go see it, I wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. Well, I mean, I would have I guess, but I would have written a very different thesis and I doubt it would have been as triumphant. I probably would have focused on George Smiley quite a bit more. John Le Carré would have moved to the center. It still would have been about the Cambridge Spies stories, but they would have been figured as part of spy literature and not as their own canon. As it is now, my thesis is the first of its kind. It feels real-world-applicable. And it's the perfect blend of fiction and history. So I'm very happy about that.
I'm also very happy about how the trip to London went from a personal standpoint. I engineered the whole thing and nothing went wrong. I packed the right clothes. Nothing was rushed. If anything, I had too much time, but it was easy to fill it. I made new friends, I saw new plays, and I learned new things about the English language. For instance, in American English, if you were to say that you quite enjoyed something, that would mean that you enjoyed it more than if you just said you enjoyed something. In British English it means that you enjoyed it less. Huh.
For the past seven or so months I've been mulling over what storytelling is. I know, for instance, that my dad is a storyteller. I know that writers are storytellers. I've decided that most conversation is storytelling.
Going to London, taking painstaking notes on Anthony Blunt's memoir, and then coming back and translating those notes into a chapter plus of prose felt a lot like storytelling too. Anthony Blunt was telling his story, obviously, but I was telling one too. It felt good, and it had a point.

Anyway, after I turned in my thesis, Roommate J, CC, and I celebrated with drinks at Triumph (appropriately enough). We're doing that each time one of us turns in a thesis. Last night we went back for CC. Next week it's Roommate J's turn.
Freshman year, this month felt so far away. I wasn't sure what sophomore year would bring, yet alone senior year. I sure couldn't have predicted that the weekend after I turned in my thesis I would bundle into the car and drive to Northern Virginia, where I would set up base camp for a weekend at the DC Cherry Blossom Festival with my two best Princeton friends. These are the kinds of stories Dad tells about his Princeton days: "Oh, we borrowed so and so's car and we drove to Boston for such and such thing and this and that happened and then we drove back in time for class on Monday." I always really enjoyed those stories, but even though I've always operated in a register of friendships/relationships more similar to my dad's than my mom's I never thought that would be me. This past weekend, it was.
Triumph!

What I Have Read Since Last April, pathetic addition. It was a slow year for reading, but a great one for academic writing. I turned my thesis in two days ago. More on that later.

1) The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer
2) Inda by Sherwood Smith
3) Brooklyn by Colm Toíbín
4) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson
5) Tinkers by Paul Harding
6) A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
7) The Fox by Sherwood Smith
8) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
9) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
10) Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
11) The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes edited by John Joseph Adams
12) Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe
13) Nineteen Seventy Four by David Peace
14) Farthing by Jo Walton
15) Ha'penny by Jo Walton
16) Nineteen Seventy Seven by David Peace
17) Nineteen Eighty by David Peace
18) Half a Crown by Jo Walton
19) Call for the Dead by John Le Carré
20) The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
21) The Legend of the King by Gerald Morris
22) Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller
23) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave, Written by Himself
24) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré
25) Beloved by Toni Morisson
26) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
27) Nineteen Eighty Three by David Peace
28) Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin
29) The Honorable Schoolboy by John Le Carré
30) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
31) A Murder of Quality by John Le Carré
32) Smiley's People by John Le Carré
33) A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury
34) Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
35) Race Matters by Cornel West
36) Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War
37) All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang
38) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
39) Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis
40) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
41) The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
42) The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis
43) The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
44) The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
45) The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
46) The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett
47) Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite
48) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
49) The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
50) In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
51) Happy Pills in America by David Herzberg
52) Smack: Heroin and the American City by Eric Schneider


This, my dears, was clearly the year of the re-read, with a grand total of twelve. It was also the year of series (but then again, with me, what year isn't?), as I devoured two and wrapped up two more.

And then, of the newly read...
Top Five of the Year, in descending order:
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin
Nineteen Seventy Four by David Peace
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Of the fifty-two, one I would never, ever read again and two were extremely overrated. One was underrated. One mentioned a Snuggie. Five really grossed me out. Four were dead boring. One hit a little too close to home. Two of the re-reads became two of my favorite books.

Today I picked Julian up from the binders.
We will spend the weekend together, and then on Tuesday I will turn him in.
Victory in Europe!